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Bolivia's ‘communitarian socialism’

Banner supporting a `yes' vote in the January 25, 2009, constitutional referendum.

By Federico Fuentes

April 1, 2009 -- The historic enactment of Bolivia’s new constitution that grants unprecedented rights to the country’s indigenous majority, approved by over 61% of the vote on January 25, represented the beginning of “communitarian socialism”, according to President Evo Morales.

This was not the first time Bolivia’s first indigenous president had
raised the concept of “communitarian socialism”. In his April 2008
speech to the United Nations, Morales spoke of the need for “a
communitarian socialism in harmony with Mother Earth”.

While Morales’s political party is officially known as Movement
Towards Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the
Peoples (MAS-IPSP), it was originally simply IPSP. Blocked from registering itself as an electoral party, the IPSP
took up the offer of the then-existing MAS party to use its registered
name to run in elections.

While individual socialists were involved from the beginning with
the IPSP, they were a tiny minority within a party that was formed as a
“political instrument” of Bolivia’s largest peasant organisations. Forged through the struggles of the coca growers and the other
peasant organisations, against US military intervention and neoliberal
policies, the MAS developed a strong anti-imperialist and
anti-neoliberal character.

As the social struggles intensified, and the MAS’s weight began to
grow in the electoral sphere, this political instrument increasingly
became an outlet for growing disillusionment with the corrupt
traditional party system.

The election of Morales as president in 2005, with a historic 53.7%
of the vote, consolidated the MAS as the leadership of a broad-based
national liberation movement — in which the peasant and indigenous
majority led urban and middle class sectors.

The dominant ideology was a militant indigenous nationalism, whose
vision involves promoting the inclusion and empowerment of the
indigenous majority.

Since being elected, the Morales government has focused on
modernising the country, promoting industrialisation, increasing state
intervention in the economy, promoting social and cultural inclusion,
and a more democratic distribution of revenue from natural resources
through various social programs.

A major achievement has been the successful drafting of a new
constitution by an elected constituent assembly — with the draft
adopted by referendum — to refound the nation on the basis of justice
for the indigenous majority.

In early 2008, Morales began to develop some underlying principles
of what “communitarian socialism” might entail, according to sources
within and close to the MAS leadership.

Differences, and then the onslaught by the right-wing opposition against the government, put this discussion on the backburner.

However, the crushing defeat of the right-wing attempts to bring
down the government in 2008 greatly weakened the power of the
opposition.

In this context, the MAS-IPSP held its seventh national congress on
January 10-12, where it approved the document “Communitarian socialism
to liberate Bolivia from the colonial state”.

The document provides a picture of how the MAS views the current revolutionary process and its direction.

According to the document, quoted by the March 2 Opinion,
the inauguration of the MAS government marked the beginning of a
“democratic and cultural revolution” that “reflects, due to the nature
of its historic subject (indigenous), a communitarian and socialist
conception orientated towards surpassing capitalist relations of
production”.

The MAS “is not proposing that we deny the possibility of utilising
the institutions or mechanisms provided by bourgeois democracy”, but
nonetheless seeks to “ideologically [prepare] our people for the path
of the revolutionary struggle”.

“That is, a revolutionary has to utilise to the maximum effect the
democratic institutions, not to consolidate them, but rather to unmask
the essence of capitalist democracy and prepare the masses for the
qualitative leap.

“With concrete political proposals that correctly interpret the
mood of the oppressed people and correctly characterise the existing
balance of social forces, it will be the people themselves who draw the
conclusions and the people who will decide — if leadership exists, of
course — the transformation of society via the revolutionary struggle.

“In conclusion, in determined conjunctures and not at all times, it
is possible to utilise the democratic struggle to prepare for the
revolutionary struggle.”

The document argued that in “a dependent [country] like ours, it is
essential that the people and its vanguard accomplish and develop a
series of bourgeois democratic tasks that have not been carried out by
the bourgeoisie.

“All the experiences of the international revolutionary movement,
above all in Latin America, have demonstrated that the socialist
revolution can not be realised if the democratic and anti-imperialist
banners are not raised.

“But neither can the democratic and anti-imperialist [tasks be]
carried out to the end, if it is not through a socialist revolution.”

The goal of the “historic project” of the indigenous peoples and
popular movements is “a social formation where large private property
of the means of production will given way to communitarian social
property; the political power of the ‘colonial-imperialist oligarchic
bloc’ will be substituted by the revolutionary construction of a new
power by the ‘indigenous nations, revolutionary classes and urban
sector bloc’.”